CMCA Announces Open Call for 2018 Biennial

The Center for Maine Contemporary Art (CMCA) is announcing an open call for submissions to the 2018 CMCA Biennial exhibition. Submissions will be accepted online through the CMCA website from January 1 through April 2, 2018. The CMCA Biennial is an open juried competition for artists at all stages of their career who have a strong connection to the state of Maine. Work in all mediums are accepted for review. The 2018 CMCA Biennial is sponsored by First National Bank.

CMCA director Suzette McAvoy states, “We are extremely grateful to First National Bank for their support of the 2018 Biennial. Their generous sponsorship of the exhibition makes it possible for CMCA to waive submission fees for all entering artists, and to engage two terrific outside jurors, Kate Green and Robin Williams. We eagerly anticipate a wonderful response to the open call for submissions.”

The CMCA Biennial typically takes place in the fall of even numbered years. The concept of an open juried competition at CMCA dates back to 1978, when then director Ben Goldsmith presented the first Annual Juried Exhibition. It was the only continuing statewide juried exhibition until the Portland Museum of Art introduced its first Biennial in 1998.

Jurors for the upcoming 2018 CMCA Biennial are Kate Green, Director of Marfa Contemporary, Marfa, Texas and Robin K. Williams, Ford Curatorial Fellow at the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, Detroit, Michigan. The Biennial will be held at CMCA from November 2018 through February 2019.
Kate Green is an art historian, curator, and critic. She holds an MA in curatorial studies from the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College, and a PhD in art history from the University of Texas at Austin. She has taught art history courses at the University of Texas and Trinity University, and has also worked as a curator and educator at Artpace, Dia Art Foundation, and MoMA PS1. Her writing has appeared in Art In America, Artforum.com, and Frieze. She is currently Director of Marfa Contemporary in Marfa, Texas.

Robin K. Williams is Ford Curatorial Fellow at the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit. She co-curated with Jens Hoffmann, Sonic Rebellion: Music As Resistance, which explores music and art as vehicles of social change. Formerly the Andrew W. Mellon Curatorial Fellow of Latin American Art at the Blanton Museum of Art as well as a Curatorial Fellow at the Visual Arts Center in Austin, Texas, Williams is currently completing her PhD at The University of Texas at Austin with a dissertation entitled “Joan Jonas’s Visual Language.” She has published several academic and critical essays, including “A Mode of Translation: Joan Jonas’s Performance Installations,” which appears in Stedelijk Studies #3, The Place of Performance (2016).

For more information and submission guidelines, visit: cmcanow.org/biennial-exhibition/. CMCA Artist Members are eligible to submit additional images for consideration. To join as an artist member, visit cmcanow.org/support/membership/.